


Chirps, or the Feline Foes of James W. Bond

by midrashic



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Cats, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Herding Cats, M/M, Q has cats, Q's Family - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:13:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23704441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: James Bond is fluent in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, BSL, and, just for fun, Esperanto. He never thought he’d be adding “Cat” to that list.
Relationships: James Bond/Q
Comments: 113
Kudos: 380
Collections: MI6 Cafe MiniBang





	Chirps, or the Feline Foes of James W. Bond

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bluebellofbakerstreet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebellofbakerstreet/gifts).



> Written for the MI6 Cafe Minibang! Many thanks to the mods for organizing the event, especially [christinefromsherwood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/christinefromsherwood/pseuds/christinefromsherwood) for answering all my dumb questions; to my beautiful betas, [storm_of_sharp_things](https://archiveofourown.org/users/storm_of_sharp_things/pseuds/storm_of_sharp_things), [soufflegirl91](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soufflegirl91/pseuds/soufflegirl91), and [castillon02](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Castillon02/pseuds/Castillon02); and to [bluebellofbakerstreet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebellofbakerstreet/pseuds/bluebellofbakerstreet) for being the best partner a writer could ask for. Art is embedded below but leave comments [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23705770)!
> 
> Find me at [tumblr](https://midrashic.tumblr.com) or on the 00Q slack chat. If you like my work and want to support me, buy me a coffee.
> 
> My comment policy boils down to one thing: **Please comment.** You. Yes, you in particular. If you would like examples, a simple heart emoji or “+kudos” now that the multiple kudos function has been disabled are hugely appreciated. Your comment does not have to be profound. Your comment does not have to be long. If all you have the energy for is the heart emoji, i appreciate that much more than a kudos or a bookmark. A kudos is not interchangeable with a short comment that says “great job!” or something similar. I always respond to comments. If you feel like your comments mean less than those from people I regularly interact with, you’re wrong; comments mean more from a stranger. I would prefer a “please update” to no comment. I would prefer a short comment to no comment. I would prefer criticism to no comment. Comments keep writers writing and in the fandoms you love. **Please comment.**

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

Q created an app for screening his mother’s calls. James discovers this one day when Q picks up his phone, which is vibrating merrily along to the Imperial Death March, pales, and then gingerly places it face-down on their fold-out dinner table. “Who is that?” James asks, interest piqued for reasons of both finding new and interesting ways to blackmail Q into doing the dishes and concern that someone else might have found a way to blackmail Q into betraying his country—which, over James’s thrice-dead-and-resurrected body.

“My mother,” Q says faintly. “I monitor her blood pressure to figure out whether or not I should pick up. It’s at 160 over 90.”

“Maybe she’s jogging,” James suggests. Q stares at him with such _why-did-I-marry-you_ incredulity that James desists. “All right,” he says, dreadfully amused. “Does she _know_ why you seem to be suspiciously good at dodging her calls when she’s angry at you?”

“No,” Q says. “I slipped the biometric feedback device into her wine four years ago.”

“Of course you did,” James says affectionately. He clears up the plates from their dinner of schnitzel with noodles (he’s doing the dishes, _again_ —Q claims he’s gotten into dishwashing debt as a result of a tiny explosion that dented the latest Q-branch car’s fender, but James isn’t sure whether Q has ever done dishes over the course of their entire relationship) and watches as Q flinches as his ringtone dies off and then begins again. “Word of advice,” he says, “perhaps you would be less stressed if your ringtone were something other than the Imperial Death March.”

And there they go; that’s the _why-did-I-marry-you_ look again that he secretly adores. James laughs, presses a kiss to Q’s crown, and thinks no more of it until about twenty minutes later, when Q’s phone vibrates, not with the sound of a procession of Stormtroopers, but with the mild chirp of a text. Q lazily thumbs it open from where James is pressing kisses to his clavicle and sits bolt upright, his heart rate jumping from lazily aroused to hypertensive crisis in moments.

James turns his head and reads the incoming text from Robin, whom he knows is Q’s sister: _Why is Mum up in arms saying that you got married without telling her?_

“Oh, shit,” James says. Q whimpers his agreement into his hair.

– ♠ –

It turns out to be, as most things are, Moneypenny’s fault. Their first date was Moneypenny’s fault; a 005-shaped emergency had led her to shove her ticket to some modern revival of a play from the nineteenth century into the nearest agent’s hands, which had been James’s. The mission on which they’d finally confessed their feelings for each other had been Moneypenny’s fault, though she maintained that the two of them were the only ones available to pose as an arms-smuggling couple at a high-society party. Their wedding had, in a roundabout way, been Moneypenny’s fault; it had been a mole’s failure of intelligence that had put James in the hospital, but it had been Moneypenny who’d pointed out that Q wouldn’t have to hack his records if he just married him already, and Q who had been so caffeine-frazzled and out of his head with panic that he’d actually thought it was a good idea. By the time James was awake enough to protest, they’d been married for two weeks already, and it seemed easier to let the whole matter lie. Also a plus: honeymooning.

“Actually,” Moneypenny says, exasperated, “this is on _you_ for not updating your address and getting all your mail redirected to your mother’s house after you moved in with him.”

“Don’t you try to logic me when you’re the reason my life is over,” Q wails.

“Were you really going to go your whole life without telling your mother you’d got married until she spied it on a tax return?” Moneypenny asks, astonished.

“Not all of us have lovely mothers who make us ackee and saltfish when we’re sick,” Q accuses. “Some of us have mothers who _open our mail_.”

– ♠ –

James thinks he’s joking about his mother until Q informs him that she refuses to acknowledge him as her son-in-law until they’ve had a proper wedding.

“I’m going to try to talk her out of it, but she’s already sending me venues and things,” Q says glumly. James debates the value of asking whether or not a twenty-nine-year-old really _needs_ a mother in his life, but that’ll just bring up a conversation about M, and he’s really not in the mood for that right now. “Don’t worry, I’ll go visit her after the CyOps thing,” he reassures James. “She’s always more pliable when she can make me feel like a terrible son in person.”

“Assuming you don’t get killed on the CyOps thing,” James says mutinously.

“Hush. You’re not the only big bad spy in the sandbox, darling.”

 _The CyOps thing_ was another bone of contention interrupting what would otherwise have been two-months-newly-married bliss. A weeklong technical retreat during which the handoff for a major brand-new cyberweapon that had the geeks in Q-branch drooling over their ergonomic keyboards was scheduled demanded that Q and an agent go undercover as a black-hat hacker and his bodyguard, respectively. “I can do it!” James had protested loudly when Q had told him, bashfully, that 006 had been selected to accompany Q (”As my _bodyguard,_ not my bodyguard-slash-lover, James, that was one time and 006 is not as _blatantly insufferable_ as you so I doubt he’ll revise our covers on the fly just to make me as uncomfortable as possible-slash-get me to sleep with him”).

“It’s in Mexico City,” Q had informed him blandly, and James had shut his mouth.

Now, James says, “Why don’t you send me over to make nice with her while you’re away?” and Q laughs so long and so loudly that James can’t help but pout. “I’m very charming, you know,” he says.

“Oh, love,” Q says fondly, “my mother cannot be _charmed._ It’s cute that you would try, though,” he says reassuringly, but in tones that clearly indicate that James has no clue what he’s volunteering to do.

In fairness—he doesn’t.

– ♠ –

He starts to get an inkling when Robin drops by thirty minutes before Q is set to leave for the airport on the CyOps thing lugging two pet carriers, like she has a familial preternatural sense for the most inconvenient time to ruin James’s life. One is shaped like a beehive; the other is normal, but vibrating alarmingly. Q opens the door and immediately blanches of all color. “What are you doing here,” he moans.

“Mum said that since you’ve settled down you can take the cats back,” Robin says cheerfully. She shoves the beehive into Q’s arms and looks around curiously. “Nice place. Married rich, did you?”

“Married rich—do you have _any idea_ how much money I make—” Q near-screeches, but at that moment Robin catches sight of James and whistles.

“And not just for the money, neither,” she mutters. James shoots her his most charming grin and thinks he can see her knees weaken.

“Yes, thank you, _get out,”_ Q says, and shoves her out the door. Not before she manages to toss the second pet carrier in after her, though. James drifts curiously to the plain carrier, which is making a noise that is not quite human but not quite animal either; the closest he has to compare it to is the noise Q’s soldering iron makes that causes him to thump it on whatever is handy. Outside, Q and Robin are quarreling, the sort of rapid-fire antagonism that only siblings who have loved and hated each other for most of their lives in equal measure are capable of. James prods the carrier with a toe—

—and jumps back as a claw lashes out, just barely managing to make it past the bars and draw blood. He hisses and hops around on one foot, momentarily grateful that no one is here but Q, who will take his secrets to the grave, mostly, if he doesn’t tipsily confess them to Moneypenny over margaritas.

“Oh no,” Q says when he comes back inside, “you’ve met Toebiter.”

“I don’t think that was its _teeth_ ,” James growls.

“ _His._ His teeth. And we call him Toebiter because when he was a kitten he’d pounce all over your feet, but yeah, he’s sort of outgrown that by now and become an all-purpose weapon of death and destruction. I thought you’d get along, actually.” He kneels down and unzips the beehive; out pops a massive grey-and-brown mog of indeterminate breeding. “This is Tillie. She’s much nicer.”

“I thought,” James says faintly, “that you were joking when you said you had two cats and a mortgage.”

Q frowns. “Why on earth would I joke about mortgages? Deadly serious matter.”

“I thought you were trying to make me feel guilty about the black hole in your budget! I didn’t know you actually had cats.”

“Well, my old building wasn’t pet-friendly and my neighbor kept threatening to poison them if Tillie didn’t stop stealing his paper,” Q says defensively. “And before we got married it’s not exactly as though we spent a lot of time at my place. Or yours, for that matter.” That was true; most of their assignations, postcoital _Doctor Who_ included, had taken place in hotel rooms, because James’s flat was, in Q’s words, “a sad reflection of his soul” and Q’s flat was roughly four hundred square feet. “So Mum took them for a few months. I’ve been meaning to get them back, but you’ve kept me run off my feet, husband dear.”

And then, to James’s horror, Q reaches down and with swift movements carefully coordinated to not bare too much skin undoes the door to the Bitey One’s cage. Toebiter bursts out in a yowling frenzy of fur and teeth and claws, which Q corrals expertly in James’s direction. Unperturbed by the way James is dancing away from the fury of fur at his feet, Q begins taking bowls and toys out of the carrying cases, and it finally hits James that, when he’d muzzily responded to Q’s bedside confession of what he’d done to gain access to his hospital room, “’Til death do us part,” these cats had apparently been included in the deal.

“Wait,” he says, “you’re going on a mission.”

“Yes,” Q says cheerfully. “It’ll be good for you. Give you a chance to bond.”

“Q,” he says, voice increasingly steeped in desperation, “I don’t know anything about cats. I—do you feed them? How do you feed them? What do you feed them? Tell me it’s not body parts.”

“Well, Toebiter might like that…” Seeing the look on James’s face, Q finally desists and says, in his least reassuring and most forbidding Quartermaster tone of voice, “Look, if I could cancel this trip I would have a long time ago, given the amount of whinging you’ve done over the fact that Alec is accompanying me and not you and how little you trust him to be appropriate, even though you’ve been best friends for over a decade. But the fact of the matter is, the retreat starts tonight, no one else has the technical knowledge to pull this off, and even if you tried to foist the cats back onto Robin I have no doubt that she could outwit even your double-oh-iest tricks because she’s a conniving shrew, and god forbid you even try to contravene my mother’s dictates. So you’re stuck with the cats, James. If you want to divorce me we can try that after I get back.”

“You’re being awfully blasé about the end of our relationship,” James tells him.

Q kisses his cheek. “That’s because I’ll get alimony. Love you, dear,” he says, except James suspects he’s saying it to the Fat One. “Now, let me give you a crash course in cat care in the fifteen minutes we have before the company car picks me up.”

– ♠ –

The thing is, James learned a long time ago to seize happiness when it came a-knocking and squeeze every last drop of it from any available opportunity. It’s why he’s been engaged three times, married twice now, and didn’t blink when Q took the opportunity to stealth-marry him in the hospital. He understands the rushing embrace of mortality, the way it makes you think twice about playing things slow. In his personal life, at least, he’s fairly willing to go where others lead, and he’d been waiting for a cue from Q about moving in anyway; a marriage certificate seems as good a hint as any. There’s always divorce, after all.

But he’s tentatively optimistic about him and Q, in a way that he hadn’t been even when he’d been proposing to his various women over the years. Q is lovely and brilliant and excellent in bed and above all, constant—a constant presence in his ear when he’s on-mission, a constant warmth and laughter in the sheets and out of them, a constant shore for him to wash up on when the missions leave him cold and more corpse than human. Q stayed by his hospital bed and read terrible choose-your-own adventure novels to him with affected voices that made him hurt his ribs laughing (even more than they’d already been hurt by a steel-capped boot), including a terrible Scottish accent that sacrificed accuracy for pitch. Q makes consistently excellent tea, consistently terrible dinners, and the way Q _smiles_ at him never changes.

He falls in love often and painfully, but this is the first time, he thinks, that staying in love has been effortless and just as enjoyable as the falling. They’ve been a year dating and now two months married-and-living-together, and he’s been thinking, for the first time, about life on a long-term basis. Learning to knit, learning card tricks to make Q laugh, reading long book series and watching long TV series to discuss with Q. He’s thinking in terms of years, not months, and he likes the feeling. He’d like to hold onto that feeling.

And he knows that Q deserves _better._ Q has given him a future and all Bond can give him is a tired, broken old spy clinging to the past. The least he can do is not force him to change his lifestyle any further.

So. Cats. He’d never imagined having pets of his own, but this is just another challenge, and he can conquer it. He excels at challenges. He’s not worried. He’s not too terribly worried.

– ♠ –

James regrets coaxing Q into a quickie instead of listening to his fifteen-minute cat-rearing lecture the moment the door closes behind Q and the Bitey One makes a beeline for the curtains and starts raking its mean little claws over the intricate weave, like it can _tell_ that the only authority figure it respects under this roof has just gone for over a week, leaving behind a hapless patsy that can be bent to its whims. Over James’s dead body. He grits his teeth and lifts the Bitey One away, scolding, “Those curtains are handmade from Morocco,” like the little beast can possibly understand him, and when he looks back the Fat One has somehow, in defiance of gravity and all known laws of physics, perched on the bookshelf and is carefully knocking over Q’s first-edition Asimovs one by one. Abruptly, the flat looks shabbier than it had before, and filled with choking hazards, potentially poisonous materials, and explosive experiments. Do you cat-proof a flat? Is it like baby-proofing, with the rubber edges on the furniture and the plugs in the outlets? Is there a guidebook for this sort of thing?

Slowly, it dawns on him: it’s going to be a long, long week.

– ♠ –

On Tuesday morning, James calls in sick. He thinks from Tanner’s snickering that although Q apparently hadn’t had time to give him a rundown of how to keep the cats from peeing on his shoes when he didn’t get the litterbox set up in time, he’d certainly had time to inform the entire executive branch of what his poor, beleaguered husband would be spending the week without him doing, his plans to mope around the apartment having been cut short at the root. “No problem, Bond,” Tanner says sweetly. “We’ll get 003 to cover your briefs. No one will have kittens over your absence, never you fear.”

“I hate you,” James says, which he can’t say to Q because he’s sworn never to lie to him, job permitting. Tanner, though, is fair game.

“My daughter fostered a pair of kittens last year,” Tanner says, because he’s evil. “I could get you the books we got her about cat care.”

“I could kill you with a plastic spoon and a rubber band, you know,” James says, watching resignedly as Tillie knocks over the jar they keep their pasta in and tries to burrow inside it, despite being too fat to stick more than her head through the opening.

“So could we all,” Tanner says. “Get in line.”

– ♠ –

On Tuesday evening, he discovers that apparently Q hadn’t been joking about Toebiter preferring human flesh to cat food. (Out of curiosity, and because he is fully aware he’s eaten worse, he samples the Fancy Feast Salmon Special; he doesn’t blame the little beast.) As the Fat One placidly chews her way through her tuna surprise, Toebiter, who is all lean muscle and glinting yellow eyes in a black-spotted face, turns up his nose at every kind of meat in their fridge and a few vegetables just for variety. At one point, James ends up chasing him around the kitchen, snarling in a highly undignified way, “Eat the salmon! Eat the salmon!”

Slumped against the kitchen cabinets, James says in defeat, “That’s your master plan, isn’t it? Starve to death and then rejoice in Cat Hell when Q comes home and divorces me.”

Toebiter yowls in assent. James buries his face in his hands.

– ♠ –

On Wednesday morning, he traps the cats inside the apartment (barely managing to avoid the Bitey One’s claw as it lashes out in the crack of the door before he closes it) and contemplates having a few hours of peace not replete with napping cats shredding fabrics in their sleep and the ever-present fear that they’ll wake up and wreak more havoc. Actually, he contemplates going to his papers guy and getting the hell out of the country for an embarrassingly long moment. Then he sighs and trudges to the library. Much as Tanner’s smugness is utterly loathsome, a book isn’t a bad idea.

 _Why Is My Cat Doing That?_ , by Barbara Leder, tells him:

_We may love our fuzzy friends, but it can feel difficult at times not to believe that they hate us in return. Luckily, the vagaries of cat behavior have been carefully recorded and deciphered over the ages by feline behavioral experts. Peeing on your carpets? Curtains in shreds? This book was written with the utmost confidence that through attention, positive reinforcement, and boundless patience, your whiskered wild one can bow to the powers of human domestication._

Attention, positive reinforcement, and keeping calm and carrying on. He can do that. It’s how he won Q’s heart, after all.

– ♠ –

On Wednesday evening, he buys out every brand of cat food at the local pet store and sets them all in front of Toebiter. He’s not quite ready to offer up his own toes as a sacrifice to the capricious pet gods, but he has a spreadsheet open on his laptop and makes careful notes when the Bitey One stops at certain highly-processed canned foods longer than others, and even deigns to take a nibble from a ham one. Struck by a blaze of inspiration, James runs out to the store and returns with three cans of Spam, which Toebiter devours with the shrieking yowl of a starved cat.

Tillie, meanwhile, has gotten into all of the food he’d left on the floor after his experiment. She hiccups contentedly and curls up on the arm of the sofa like a fuzzy pat of butter. “No wonder you’re the Fat One,” James grumbles.

– ♠ –

On Thursday morning, he practices his slow, non-confrontational blinking. The Bitey One has only shredded two of his shirts this morning from when he accidentally left the dresser drawer open, which he calls a win; he’s been hiding the nicer silk shirts under the mattress, but he suspects it’ll only be so long before the Bitey One figures out where the nice soft shredding material is and somehow gets into the mattress to fulfill his goal of making James look like the kind of shabby, clawed-up middle management who buys off-the-rack. Toebiter glares and turns his back on James, but Tillie seems game to sit down and agree on a cessation of hostilities, which is great, because if Toebiter’s racket is shredding, biting, and clawing, Tillie’s is peeing. On everything. The number of throw cushions James has already thrown out alone.

 _Okay,_ James tries to telepathically project through a series of slow blinks, _I’ll get you the Fancy Feast that you ate all of last night if you don’t throw up again and also agree to stop peeing in my shoes._

With an arrogant tip of her head, Tillie surveys her vassal… and chooses mercy. She yawns and curls up, her back strategically angled to suggest pets. James sighs and cards his fingers through her fur, exhausted and grateful and wishing he had never returned from Turkey that time everyone thought he was dead (no, not that time, the other time).

– ♠ –

On Thursday evening, the Bitey One gets into Q’s things. James never thought he would mourn the green-and-white striped cardigan that makes Q look like a Dr. Seuss character, but here he is. He’s just about to punt Toebiter out the window when he coughs like a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner and curls up in the shredded remnants of Q’s wardrobe, and James, to his horror, feels the same melting sensation that infected him the first time he saw Q asleep, glasses askew, drool sticking important paperwork to his face. “You miss him, too, hm?” he says, feeling as though he and Toebiter have seen eye-to-eye for the first time. He settles down gingerly next to Toebiter, stretching his feet out so as to avoid presenting a tempting target. Toebiter hisses fiercely but then scrunches up in an unhappy ball and James feels for him, he really does.

“Yeah,” James says, allowing himself to feel the quiet pressing in on him for the first time, given that he’s been running around after two little gremlins for the past four days. Q has left all of his things in a decidedly not-cat-friendly state; Tillie had choked when she’d tried to eat the neuro-paralyser dart Q had left partially disassembled on the kitchen counter, and Bond isn’t sure whether it’s punishment for the last time he fucked up on guard/escort duty or utter faith in his ability to keep valuable assets alive that convinced Q that the cats would be fine, but he is not impressed and definitely not grateful for the faith.

But the little touches—Q’s shampoo in the bath, his papers spread out over his home office in his incomprehensible filing maze that might order everything numerically using a base seven system, his stupid laptop stickers flashing on their nightstand—all remind him that although he’s been gone from Q fairly often, it’s a whole other animal to have Q gone from _him,_ his safety in the hands of someone else, no high-stakes espionage (or even low-stakes espionage) to distract him from the coldness on the left side of the bed.

He wonders when he got so codependent.

“He’ll be back,” James tells Toebiter, and evens gives him a little skritch around the ears. “He will. He’ll come back to us.”

– ♠ –

On Friday morning, he cracks open the “training” section of the book, thinking that he might try to impress Q by getting one of the cats to perch on his shoulder. The Fat One falters, tending to overbalance and dig small but sharp little claws into the meat of his arm whenever she does, but the Bitey One takes to it surprisingly well. He is delicate and still for long periods of time—likely calculating how best to attack James’s toes next—and seems to have decided that a higher vantage point can only be a good thing. James feeds him little cubes of Spam and Toebiter deigns to make a sound that might even be the creaking, rusty-jointed relative of a purr.

– ♠ –

On Friday evening, a car backfires on the street outside, and James blinks and finds himself crouched by the side of the door, gun that had been taped under the sofa drawn and cocked, and feeling slightly foolish—he _knows_ the difference between a car backfiring and a gunshot, he _does,_ he’s not some shaky-legged veteran fresh from a hot zone who jumps at takeaway containers thinking they might be IEDs. Still. London. London is not a place for loud noises and split-second instincts that might save his life. London is a place for the still-warm pillow right after he opens his eyes, the scent of citrus and bergamot wafting out of the bathroom as Q steps out from the shower, and, apparently, two cantankerous cats who he _loathes_ —

Except Toebiter is hiding under the sofa and hisses and lashes out with a shaking claw when James’s toes appear in the crack between floor and sofa cushion, and James—

 _Empathizes,_ God help him. Dodging Toebiter’s claws, which he has become a bit of an expert in by now, he settles against the living room wall, a scant meter away from the sofa, and says in low tones, absolutely sure that Toebiter is listening with a furious intensity that reminds him of cornered terrorists, “You’re safe, you know. He’s not here right now, but… he’d never let anything happen to you. He loves you, God knows why. You’re here, and you’re fine, and you’re safe.”

Slowly, slowly, Toebiter inches out from under the sofa, flat as a pancake, flinching and diving back underneath the sofa anytime James makes a move like he’s about to get up. James must doze off at some point, because one moment Toebiter is half out of the sofa and the next Toebiter is gingerly stepping into his lap. James raises a hand, gently, and Toebiter flinches, the terrible whole-body flinch of the rescue pet, but James gently lowers his fingers into Toebiter’s fur and just pets, just pets. Tillie, interested, flops over to them and starts to lick Toebiter’s ears.

James runs his fingers down Toebiter’s shaking spine and says, “All right, all right, you’re all right. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you. You’re all right.”

– ♠ –

On Saturday morning, he picks up the books from the floor and decides to invest in cat shelves.

It’s _their_ flat, technically, in that they’d both moved from their own individual places to occupy this one after having gotten shotgun married in the medical wing, but it’s really Q’s flat, because all James has is the occasional souvenir and a very comfortable leather armchair. He thinks, as a first touch to impressing his personality upon this place, whatever will get the cats to stop shedding all over his first edition of _Alice in Wonderland_ is a good first step.

Toebiter rides on his shoulder and Tillie naps on a cat shelf; they just like to be tall, thinks James with something approaching affection. As a former child who was the shortest in his class until he turned fifteen and shot up a foot and a half, he sympathizes. They’re almost not complete terrors after all.

– ♠ –

What they get up to on Sunday morning is classified. Tillie, though, is surprisingly good at tripping up would-be assassins on command.

– ♠ –

On Sunday evening, Q’s mother drops by.

He’s trying to teach Toebiter the appropriate shoes to claw (terrorists’ steel-capped boots? yes; James’s patent leather oxfords? no) with the help of visual aids and Spam cubes when the doorbell rings. James sneaks a glimpse through the peephole before opening it and sees a nondescript, plump, elderly woman with no readily apparent ties to organised crime or international terrorist syndicates. Wondering if he’s about to meet a neighbor asking for that all-important and elusive cup of flour, he opens the door a crack and then shoves Toebiter away with the tip of his house shoe, as he has come screeching and yowling like a whirling dervish of death at the new toes impinging on his territory.

“Nasty little devil,” the woman says. “And you must be James. Shall I come in?”

In a blink, she’s somehow shouldered her way past him, sat herself on James’s leather chair, and settled a surprised Tillie into her lap, who is purring in a bewildered sort of way, like she’s not entirely sure how she got here but isn’t exactly complaining about it either. “I’m Margaret Marsh,” she says coolly, with a steeliness to her that reminds him of—well, M, actually—a steeliness that doesn’t pop up very often in seasoned intelligence leaders, much less civilians. “Wren and Robin’s mother.”

“Oh,” James says dumbly. “Hello.”

Margaret sniffs. James wonders if she’s suspected all along that Q married him for his looks and not his brains and has just had it confirmed. James shakes himself out of it—damn it, you know how to be charming, you’ve never had it put to the test but you’ve always suspected that mothers-in-law would love you—and drifts to the kitchen. “Tea?” he says in his most pleasant tones. “Er, Wren’s not here. If you were looking for him.”

“I suspected,” Margaret says in deeply foreboding tones. “He tends to run away for a bit whenever his compartmentalization skills fail him. And leaving you with the little devils, I see. I’d like to say I raised him better than that, but to tell the truth I absolutely didn’t.”

“Oh, they haven’t been…” James says lamely. Margaret skewers him with a look so fierce that he stops trying immediately. It’s the same effect Q’s _why-did-I-marry-you_ looks have on him, but a thousand times more terrifying.

“They like you, though,” she says contemplatively. “That’s something, isn’t it.” She beckons to Toebiter. James cringes, waiting for him to snap at her fingers—but he just pads toward her and flumphs down by her feet. She slips off one sensible shoe and strokes his ears with his toes, then turns her attention to James, who is probably gaping like a fish, his hands clenching as though they could wrap around the little imp’s throat and just throttle him. “Lemon, please.”

James looks down at the tea tray in his hands and abruptly comes back to himself. “Right,” he mutters, and tries not to feel like he’s being judged on his tea service. _I can make tea in the Moroccan, Turkish, and Japanese styles_ , he wants to say. Not to mention Q’s tea-snobbish orders to perfection, from the tea subscription boxes he gets every month like a true hipster millennial, usually with a small snack cake to match the flavors perfectly. Still, he can’t help but feel this is a test he’s failing. He steeps Margaret’s tea at exactly the temperature and length that Q prefers, adds a squeeze of lemon and garnishes it with a precise lemon wedge, and serves it to her without any flourishes; he feels that this woman, like M, is a person who scorns flourishes. Her eyebrows go up when she tastes it, which has to be a good sign.

“Sit,” she says, and he tries to ignore that he’s just been told to sit in his own home. He sits.

“Is this the part where you tell me that if I break his heart, they’ll never find my body?” he asks. Toebiter licks his paw demurely.

“Oh, goodness, no. This isn’t a movie, James dear. Wren can certainly take care of himself, he doesn’t need his old mum interfering.” She takes another sip. “This is quite good, you know. Wren’s Ceylon blend of the week, is it? No. What I want is to tell you a story.” Tillie meows and slouches from Margaret’s lap into her favorite spot on James’s feet, pinning him in place. He’s beginning to suspect a conspiracy.

“Wren’s father left when he was twelve and Robin was fourteen. Robin, of course, dealt with it the way most teenagers would: some fights with other girls, some detention after getting caught smoking the marijuana behind the school building. I could handle that.

“Wren, though, clung to me when he was twelve. And then he ran away twice when he was thirteen and then four times when he was fourteen. Not to see his father, mind you, just… away. And he was good at it, too. One time we only got him back because of the help of the police. Most children, they act out because they secretly want to be caught, they want to be convinced that someone still cares, though of course they hate being yelled at, so they go about it in the most counterproductive way possible. Wren, I think, wanted to disappear.”

James doesn’t say anything. He sees that impulse in Q sometimes, in the way that Q has his own stash of passports and cash like a field agent does, in the way Q has safe houses around the world the way a field agent does, in the way that in spite of the cosiness of this home Q’s Asimov first editions and the few knick-knacks of value are all on the top bookshelf, ready to be swept into a suitcase if necessary. He doesn’t say anything because… well. It would be a little hypocritical of him, wouldn’t it?

“I don’t pretend to know him better than you do,” Margaret says. “We get most of our news about each other through Robin nowadays, and it doesn’t actually surprise me that he got married without telling any of us. I think he hated so badly being dependent on other people that when he finally had some independence of his own—well. That’s another story. You’ll find as a parent that psychoanalysing your children becomes your favorite hobby,” she advises James, and when he opens his mouth to protest that cat fatherhood is by _far_ enough responsibility for him, she blusters on, “I doubt this was a very well-thought-out affair on either of your parts. No, don’t tell me you love him; even if I did believe you, I frankly don’t care. Romantic love is transient. Marriage is made of sterner stuff. But I wanted to explain to you that Wren clings and lets go in turns, that he followed me everywhere for a year and spent the rest of his life trying to get away from me; that he’ll marry someone and try to drive them away. Like, for example, plying them with cats.”

She expertly removes Toebiter from where he’s embedded himself in her shoe. “ _This_ ,” she says, “is where I tell you that you’d better know what you’re doing. Because if you break his heart, he’ll likely hardly be blameless. But I would still rather not see my son upset, if it’s all the same to you.”

There are lots of things James could say in response. _Fuck you_ is one of them. _I love him_ is another. _You have nothing to worry about_ is one, but that would be a lie, and he already suspects that as much as he’s promised never to lie to Q, that promise has somehow transferred into an inability to lie to the woman who gave birth to him. “Thank you,” he says. “Would you like another cup?”

She smiles and pushes Toebiter’s fangy face away with the heel of her foot. “I would, thank you,” she says. “Now, tell me, have you figured out the trick with the Spam?”

– ♠ –

On Thursday evening, Q comes home.

“James?” he calls out, too cheerfully for someone who left their husband in the same room as two fuzzy death machines over a week prior. “I’m home. You can come gloat now. I’m never going on a mission with 006 again.”

“In the kitchen,” James calls back.

Q peeks his head into the kitchen and blinks when he sees James demonstrating how to crawl into a cabinet for Toebiter and Tillie, the latter of whom is watching raptly, the former of whom is sniffing distractedly at whatever is under the oven but begrudgingly, James can tell, charmed by his new human vassal’s attempt at working his control over the uncontrollable forces of nature that are cats. “We are learning about what to do when an assassin breaks into the flat,” he tells Q.

Q checks his toes not very surreptitiously for bites, claw marks, or other signs of gangrene. “You’re getting along better than I might have hoped,” he says, and smiles. He kneels down next to James to give him a slow, lingering kiss. James is honored, given that his next move is to bury his nose in Tillie’s fur, both that Q did him the consideration of giving him a kiss pre-cat contamination and that he was the first to be greeted. _Take that,_ he thinks smugly to the cats.

“I confess,” Q says lowly, his arms around Toebiter, who is begrudgingly suffering this indignity from what is probably his favorite person and no other (James empathizes), “I wasn’t sure you’d still be here.”

James looks at him, this ridiculous force of nature of a man, who slammed into his life with the force of a freight train and never left it. James looks at him, and thinks of compartmentalization and clinging and driving away, thinks of his own myriad issues, and thinks that they can fight over proper pet adoption etiquette another day. He thinks of the Smart Blood running through his veins and the trackers in the lining of his socks, he thinks of the way Q moved his things in automatically while he was in the hospital for fear he might say no, he thinks of Q’s neuroses and unanticipated habits of love and the way that he holds James too tightly sometimes that James thinks _he_ might break first. James looks at him, this fragile-looking creature that he could snap like a twig, and thinks of his unexpected bravery, the way he took a lover with a life expectancy like James’s and never flinched away, the way that when presented with the folly of his choice he only pressed closer, not pulled farther away. He looks at him and thinks of the real reason he didn’t protest when he woke up in a hospital bed, lucid for the first time in nearly a month, and Q told him they were married now and to take it up with HR if he didn’t like it.

“Yes, well,” James says and smiles as Toebiter gives a rusty chirp of pleasure as Q’s long, dexterous fingers rub warm, soothing circles between his ears, “we found common ground.”

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

**Author's Note:**

> Q smiles at him as he gathers the remains of their salmon fillets in maple-soy glaze and puts them in the sink. Toebiter is on the table, making hilarious faces from where he’d snuck a glass of James’s scotch, and the bowls of his and Tillie’s salmon-flavored wet food underneath the pull-out table have been demolished. “I know it’s your job to assimilate the language, the customs, the food the moment you enter a foreign nation,” Q says, that particularly charming lilt in his voice he gets when he’s about to say something especially cutting, “but I have to say, I think you’re taking it a bit far. I’m not sure how I feel about having three cats crawling all over my things and scent-marking my shoes.”
> 
> “Oh, I don’t know. I think I could get you to change your tune to something approximating a purr,” James says. Q laughs derisively, as he does with most of James’s attempts at seduction, but pins him against the sink and sticks his tongue down his throat, so he must be doing something right.
> 
> James’s hands drift down to Q’s hips, rubbing the slice of skin revealed where his shirt rides up, and Q’s kiss grows filthier. His demanding hands are curled in James’s hair, and James smirks as he feels the evidence of Q’s need press against his thigh. He riles Q up more, gets him hotter and hotter, and then—stops.
> 
> “What?” Q demands breathlessly when he notices that James is no longer moving.
> 
> “They’re looking at us,” James says under his breath.
> 
> “They’re—” Q twists his head around. And sees the cats, both of whom are staring at them with something approaching fascination. “For God’s sake! You’ve had sex with most of MI6 watching on the big screen! You can’t tell me that big bad international spy James Bond is nudity-shy around cats.”
> 
> “I have too much respect for them to subject them to this,” James sniffs, and Q chokes with laughter, but takes his hands and leads him to the bedroom anyway, and that, James thinks, is how you know it’s really love.


End file.
